The Clyde Mystery

By Andrew Lang

The wealthy Mr. Clyde is found dead, shot to death in his home. Inspector Carr suspects a conspiracy between the victim's young wife and her lover.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JH
• Release date: Mar 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9788832591132

Andrew Lang

Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a Scottish editor, poet, author, literary critic, and historian. He is best known for his work regarding folklore, mythology, and religion, for which he had an extreme interest in. Lang was a skilled and respected historian, writing in great detail and exploring obscure topics. Lang often combined his studies of history and anthropology with literature, creating works rich with diverse culture. He married Leonora Blanche Alleyne in 1875. With her help, Lang published a prolific amount of work, including his popular series, Rainbow Fairy Books.

Book preview

The Clyde Mystery

Andrew Lang

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I--THE CLYDE MYSTERY

The reader who desires to be hopelessly perplexed, may desert the contemplation of the Fiscal Question, and turn his eyes upon The Mystery of the Clyde. Popular this puzzle cannot be, for there is no demmed demp disagreeable body in the Mystery. No such object was found in Clyde, near Dumbarton, but a set of odd and inexpensive looking, yet profoundly enigmatic scraps of stone, bone, slate, horn and so forth, were discovered and now repose in a glass case at the National Museum in Queen Street, Edinburgh.

There, as in the Morgue, lies awaiting explanation the corpus delicti of the Clyde Mystery. We stare at it and ask what are these slate spear heads engraved with rude ornament, and certainly never meant to be used as lethal weapons? What are these many-shaped perforated plaques of slate, shale, and schist, scratched with some of the old mysterious patterns that, in almost every part of the world, remain inscribed on slabs and faces of rock? Who incised similar patterns on the oyster-shells, some old and local, some fresh--and American! Why did any one scratch them? What is the meaning, if meaning there be, of the broken figurines or stone dolls? They have been styled totems by persons who do not know the meaning of the word totem, which merely denotes the natural object,--usually a plant or animal,--after which sets of kinsfolk are named among certain savage tribes. Let us call the little figures figurines, for that commits us to nothing.

Then there are grotesque human heads, carved in stone; bits of sandstone, marked with patterns, and so forth. Mixed with these are the common rude appliances, quern stones for grinding grain; stone hammers, stone polishers, cut antlers of deer, pointed bones, such as rude peoples did actually use, in early Britain, and may have retained into the early middle ages, say 400-700 A.D.

This mixed set of objects, plus the sites in which they were found, and a huge canoe, 35 feet long, is the material part of the Clyde Mystery. The querns and canoe and stone-polishers, and bones, and horns are commonly found, we say, in dwellings of about 400-700 A.D. The peculiar and enigmatic things are not elsewhere known to Scottish antiquaries. How did the two sets of objects come to be all mixed up together, in an old hill fort, at Dunbuie on Clyde; and among the wooden foundations of two mysterious structures, excavated in the mud of the Clyde estuary at Dumbuck and Langbank, near Dumbarton? They were dug up between 1896 and 1902.

This is the question which has been debated, mainly in newspaper controversy, for nearly ten years. A most rambling controversy it has been, casting its feelers as far as central Australia, in space, and as far back as, say, 1200 B.C. in time.

Either the disputed objects at the Museum are actual relics of life lived in the Clyde basin many centuries ago; or the discoverers and excavators of the old sites are dogged by a forger who dumps down false relics of kinds unknown to Scottish antiquaries; or some of the unfamiliar objects are really old, while others are jocose imitations of these, or--there is some other explanation!

The modern Clyde artists are credited by Dr. Robert Munro with some practical artistic skill, and some acquaintance with the very old and mysterious designs on great rocks among the neighbouring hills. {4} What man of artistic skill, no conscience, and a knowledge of archaic patterns is associated with the Clyde?

The faker is not the mere mischievous wag of the farm-house or the country shop. It is possible that a few interpolations of false objects have been made by another and less expert hand, but the weight of the problem rests on these alternatives,--the disputed relics which were found are mainly genuine, though unfamiliar; or a forger not destitute of skill and knowledge has invented and executed them--or--there is some other explanation.

Three paths, as usual, are open to science, in the present state of our knowledge of the question. We may pronounce the unfamiliar relics genuine, and prove it if we can. We may declare them to be false objects, manufactured within the last ten years. We may possess our souls in patience, and put the objects to a suspense account, awaiting the results of future researches and of new information.

This attitude of suspense is not without precedent in archaeology. Antiquarian lore, as Dr. Munro remarks by implication, can distinguish between true and false antiquities. {5a} But time is needed for the verdict, as we see when Dr. Munro describes the Breonio Controversy about disputed stone objects, a controversy which began in 1885, and appears to be undecided in 1905. {5b} I propose to advocate the third course; the waiting game, and I am to analyse Dr. Munro's very able arguments for adopting the second course, and deciding that the unfamiliar relics are assuredly impostures of yesterday's manufacture.



II--DR. MUNRO'S BOOK ON THE MYSTERY

Dr. Munro's acute and interesting book, Archaeology and False Antiquities, {6} does not cover the whole of its amusing subject. False gems, coins, inscriptions, statues, and pictures are scarcely touched upon; the author is concerned chiefly with false objects of the pre-historic and proto-historic periods, and with these as bearing on the Clyde controversy of 1896-1905. Out of 292 pages, at least 130 treat directly of that local dispute: others bear on it indirectly.

I have taken great interest in this subject since I first heard of it by accident, in the October or November of 1898. As against Dr. Munro, from whose opinions I provisionally dissent, I may be said to have no locus standi. He is an eminent and experienced archaeologist in matters of European pre-historic and proto-historic times. Any one is at liberty to say of me what another celebrated archaeologist, Mr. Charles Hercules Read, said, in a letter to Dr. Munro, on December 7, 1901, about some one else: a person designated as ---, and described as a merely literary man, who cannot understand that to practised people the antiquities are as readable as print, and a good deal more accurate. {7} But though merely literary, like Mr. ---, I have spent much time in the study of comparative anthropology; of the manners, ideas, customs, implements, and sacred objects of uncivilised and peasant peoples. Mr. --- may not have done so, whoever he is. Again, as practised people often vary widely in their estimates of antique objects, or objects professing to be antique, I cannot agree with Mr. Read that the antiquities are as readable as print,--if by antiquities he means antiquities in general. At the British Museum I can show Mr. Read several admirable specimens of the art of faking, standing, like the Abomination of Desolation, where they ought not. It was not by unpractised persons that they were purchased at the national expense. We are all fallible, even the oldest of us. I conceive Mr. Read, however, to mean the alleged and disputed antiquities of the Clyde sites, and in that case, his opinion that they are a curious swindle is of the most momentous weight.

But, as to practised opinion on antiquities in general, Dr. Munro and I agree that it is really very fallible, now and again. The best authorities, he proves, may read antiquities differently. He is not certain that he has not himself, on occasion, taken fakes for true antiques. {8a} The savants of the Louvre were lately caught by the notorious tiara of Saitaphernes, to the pecuniary loss of France; were caught